With regard to public employments, the nobles require that the venality of offices should be done away with in all places connected with the magistracy, and that, in appointments of this kind, the citizens in general should be presented by the nation to the king, and nominated by him without any distinction, except as regards conditions of age and capacity. The majority also opines that the _Tiers-État_ should not be excluded from military rank, and that every military man, who had deserved well of his country, should have the right to rise to the very highest grade. ‘The order of nobility does not approve of any law that closes the portals of military rank to the order of the _Tiers-État_,’ is the expression used by some of the memorials. But the nobles desire that the right of coming into a regiment as officer, without having first gone through the inferior grades, should be reserved to themselves alone. Almost all the Instructions, however, require the establishment of fixed regulations, applicable alike to all, for the bestowal of rank in the army, and demand that they should not be entirely left to favour, but be conferred, with the exception of those of superior officers, by right of seniority. As regards the clerical functions, they require the re-establishment of the elective system in the bestowal of benefices, or at least the appointment by the King of a committee that may enlighten him in the distribution of these benefices. Lastly, they express the opinion that, for the future, pensions ought to be given away with more discernment; that they ought no longer to be exclusively lavished upon certain families; that no citizen ought to have more than one pension, or receive the salary of more than one place at a time, and that all reversions of such emoluments should be abolished. _The Church and the Clergy._--In matters which do not affect its own interests and especial constitution, the nobility is far less scrupulous. In all that regards the privileges and organisation of the Church, its eyes are opened wide enough to existing abuses. It desires that the clergy should have no privileges in matters of taxation, and that it should pay its debts without putting the burden of them on the nation: moreover, that the monastic orders should undergo a complete reformation. The greater part of the Instructions declare that these monastic establishments have wholly departed from the original spirit of their institution.